I am giving up on my current setup. I now have an AOpen AK73-1394 Motherboard with an Athlon XP1800+ CPU and 512 megs of SDRAM (168 pin). I also have an AGP video card that I would like to reuse.

This machine was working fine for a few years but it's now taken to locking up randomly. Sometime when I power it up (or reset (after a crash)) it won't even get to the bios startup screen. I suspect the motherboard as I have ran many tests on this machine to test ram, cpu and harddrives and all have been successful. I have even formatted and reinstalled Windows. (The black screen I got last night was the one that made me smarten up and realize it's probably a deep rooted hardware problem, I haven't checked for leaking/swollen caps yet though.)

I am in a bit of a tigh predicament though, I am about five weeks away from becoming a new dad and I really can't justify spending much money. On the flip side the pc pissed me off last night while trying to combine multiple Winnie The Pooh movies onto one DVD to make watching them easier and to help save the originals!

I don't do any pc gaming, but I do do a fair bit of DVD authoring and some video editing. So far I have found two motherboards that look ok and the price is good. I wouldn't be able to reuse my ram but I might be able to sell it (and my old cpu) to offset the cost of new ram.

Here's what I have found...
Option Number 1, with no cooling fan included.
Option Number 2, with cooling fan and some differences that I am not sure if they make any difference to me.

Any thoughts or suggestions on these setups? Will I notice much of a speed increase from my Athlon 1800+ to a celeron D 2.93ghz?

Thanks for any advice you can offer!

Rene

I haven't used one of the newest ones, but I'm definitely not a big fan of Celeron processors. I don't know what it is, but I can always tell when I sit down at a machine with one, because the things you don't care about are reasonably quick, but anything productive seems to take painfully long. Your video authoring will be especially painful.

I will be doing video editing, but I am ok with the performance of my current maching (when it doesn't lock up). Will this be any better? Will it possibly be worse??????

Thanks!

I thought it had diminished floating point capabilities too? Maybe missing the SSE and SSE2 extensions or something?

Mac Mini Core Duo. Well above your price range, but the best solution to your problem.

Matthew

Could you RMA the motherboard? I was able (pending) to RMA two EPoX boards which were under 3 years old by a few days. Of course, they had leaking caps, so EPoX should feel compelled to replace them.

It's the cheapest solution and avoids having to reinstall all of your software. That is, if you can be without a machine for a while. Unless AOpen does "advance RMA" where they send you a replacement board first....

Thought about it, but at 5 years old I doubt it. I still haven't gotten around to checking the caps as they might rma it anyways if the caps are bad.

Rene